de Sitter Bubbles and the Swampland

Abstract

A number of Swampland conjectures and in particular the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) suggest that de Sitter space is highly unstable if it exists at all. In this paper we construct effective theories of scalars rolling on potentials which are dual to a chain of short-lived dS spaces decaying from one to the next through a cascade of non-perturbative nucleation of bubbles. We find constraints on the effective potential resulting from various swampland criteria, including TCC, Weak Gravity Conjecture and Distance Conjecture. Surprisingly we find that TCC essentially incorporates all the other ones, and leads to a subclass of possible dual effective potentials. These results marginally rule out emergence of eternal inflation in the dual effective theory. We discuss some cosmological implications of our observations.

21 pages + appendices, 7 figures. v2: References added v3: References corrected

References in corpus (8)

• The Schwinger mechanism revisited
• The web of swampland conjectures and the TCC bound
• Eternal inflation, bubble collisions, and the persistence of memory
• Weak gravity conjecture in the asymptotical dS and AdS background
• Hawking-Moss bounces and vacuum decay rates
• Bubbles of Nothing in Flux Compactifications
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• Late-time Cosmology without Dark Sector but with Closed String Massless Sector
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